Microsoft 365 License Audit: How The Building Company Reportedly Cut Renewal Costs by 38%

The piece has limits, and this article keeps them in view:

• The author sells the services she is describing.
• The headline savings figure comes from the vendor.
• The cloud-waste statistic comes from a survey about a different kind of spend.

The argument: support is the start, not the finish​

Stodel's premise is simple. When users cannot log in, nobody wants a three-year roadmap. They want the problem fixed. She says she would hesitate to trust strategic advice from a provider that cannot handle the basics.

Her complaint is that a business can get excellent support and still run on choices made when it was much smaller. Her example is a department that buys a subscription to fix a reporting gap. Nobody checks whether the existing platform could have done the job, and a year later the company may be paying for both.

She wants providers to do four things:

• Arrive at major renewals with usage data and a view of the options.
• Join planning for something like a new office while connectivity and support can still be arranged properly.
• Raise recovery arrangements when a system becomes more important to daily operations, even without a recent incident.
• Sometimes recommend against spending, such as keeping a system another year, or fixing gaps in recovery testing or access controls before the next software purchase.

These are the author's expectations, not contractual norms or an industry standard. Internal teams still make the business decisions. The ask is that they make them with better information.

The Flexera figure: useful, but easy to misread​

Stodel cites Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report. It found respondents estimating that 29% of their infrastructure and platform cloud spending was wasted. Three caveats apply.

• It is an estimate, and it covers IaaS and PaaS. Flexera's own page says wasted cloud spend on IaaS and PaaS rose slightly to 29% after years of decline. Flexera links the rise to cost complexity from AI and new services. It is not a measure of Microsoft 365 licence waste.
• The sample skews American. The survey covered 753 respondents. Per Flexera, 62% were in the US, 23% in Europe and 13% in Asia-Pacific. Only 17% represented small and medium businesses.
• Flexera sells the remedy. It sells cloud and technology-asset management tools, so treat the report as vendor research.

Flexera also found that 8% of respondents are not tracking SaaS costs at all, up from 5% the year before. That is a separate visibility finding. It is arguably closer to the licence-sprawl problem Stodel describes, but it is not the 29% figure.

The case study: The Building Company​

The example Stodel leans on is a Microsoft 365 licence review for South African retailer The Building Company. IT-Online covered it in July 2026. The Cloud Crew helped the company save R6 million on its annual Microsoft 365 renewal, using its Azure-powered licence audit application. The company reportedly put the saving at about 38% of annual Microsoft licensing spend on a like-for-like basis.

Both numbers come from The Cloud Crew's account of its own work. I found no independent audit of them.

What the review actually looked at​

The assessment was about licence assignments and usage signals, not content. According to IT-Online, the application analyses licence assignments and usage signals across Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint and Office apps, and does not analyse user content. It looked at indicators such as when services were last accessed. That matters for anyone worried about privacy or works-council objections to this kind of audit.

The reported workflow ran like this:

1. The tool produced an "as-is" licence summary and a recommended one, along with a dashboard and CSV data.
2. The Building Company used that data to map user and job-profile requirements and ran its own financial modelling.
3. The vendor's licensing specialists validated the recommendations, discussed user requirements, and advised on refinements, including where Frontline Worker licensing could be appropriate.

IT-Online attributes the saving to right-sizing licence SKUs, reassessing broad assignment of Enterprise E3 and EMS licensing, and moving eligible users to more suitable licensing models. The core services needed for each role were retained. The review also found users holding services they did not use, and cases where third-party products already covered similar functionality.

What changed afterwards​

The more durable result is the process change. The reported follow-ups were:

• Profiling users up front and automating licence allocation by worker type.
• Removing inactive services or licences so they can be reassigned.
• Running a licensing recommendation exercise with The Cloud Crew twice a year.
• Adopting an annual commitment model instead of a three-year one, for flexibility to add or remove licences.

These are one customer's arrangements. They are not Microsoft licensing rules, and similar contract terms or savings may not be available to every organisation.

What admins can take from this​

You do not need a consultancy to borrow the method. The practical steps are these:

1. Treat the renewal as a checkpoint. Compare assigned licences with observed service usage and with what each role needs.
2. Profile by worker type. Broad group-based assignment is where the reported over-licensing came from.
3. Look for overlap. Check whether third-party tools duplicate something already in your plan, and vice versa.
4. Check eligibility before downgrading. Options like Frontline licensing depend on who the users are and what they do. Do not assume any one SKU is unnecessary.
5. Weigh commitment length against flexibility. Shorter terms were part of this customer's approach, but check what your agreement and licensing channel allow.
6. Document the decision. Record what you keep, what you change and what you want to investigate further.
7. Keep the non-cost items on the agenda. Recovery testing and access controls were Stodel's examples of things to raise before the next purchase. Her piece gives no specific procedure for either.

How much weight to give it​

This is a thought-leadership piece from a vendor, and its commercial interest shows. The case study is a good fit for the argument it supports, and the author does not hide the sales angle. She says plainly that providers have a commercial interest and that clients should expect advice against spending.

The strongest evidence in the package is the specific, attributed licence review. The weakest link is the Flexera statistic, which supports only the general point that organisations struggle with cloud cost visibility.

The test of stewardship is whether your provider can discuss usage data, options and risks at the next meeting, not just the ticket count. If it cannot, that is worth knowing before the next renewal.